The Zarafa Summercamp 2010 came to an end on Friday the 18th of June – a 2 day conference which again drew a lot of interest, cementing its position at the top of European open source vendor events, through even higher attendance numbers than in 2009 and intensified contributions of community members and partners.
 
This event showed itself once again to be a magnet for developers, technology and business partners, customers and journalists from all over the world. More than 250 people gathered in Brussels to be updated about Zarafa’s growth and product vision and got the news about the Zarafa Archiving (ZA) and the launch of its integration framework, http://www.zarafa.com/wiki/index.php/Python_API, firsthand.
 
Zarafa CEO Brian Joseph,strongly believes that Zarafa is on track in growth: “The open source ecosystem was well represented at our Summercamp and really boosted it. In a recent worldwide study of the VAR Guy on open source business, http://www.thevarguy.com/the-open-source-50,
Zarafa was ranked 11th. This shows that Zarafa has made its step to the top of open source vendors”.
 
After the inspiring keynote speech of Steven Schuurman, co-founder of SpringSource and CEO of JTeam, open source integrators discussed in round tables and workshops their best practices like the usage of SSD storage.
 
The second, more technical, day of the Summercamp started with the outcome of the Zarafa Virtual Machine Competition, initiated by Helmuth Neuberger, CEO of Zarafa Germany: "Due to virtual machines it was possible, in a few days, to download and test very complicated integrated solutions around the Zarafa Collaboration Platform. To install and test the software from 10 partners the old way, by installing from scratch, might need a month’s work from a very experienced technician. By using virtual machines 80% was done by junior support people and the jury only needed a few hours to decide. This shows exactly the strength of the virtualization concept”. Three winners in three separate categories presented their VM: LINET Services (category: Up-sell & scale-up), bitbone AG (category: Suitability for daily use) and Collax (category: Cool add-ons).
 
Zarafa also took the opportunity to hand the yearly Zarafa Summercamp Awards:
1.Best Community Contribution - Robert Scheck
2.Best Integration Contribution - Catworkx
3.Zarafa Partner of the Year  - Millenux
4.Most Contributing Partner to Zarafa Suggestions and Tools - Uniwan
5.Zarafa Evangelist of the Year - Sander Mittertreiner, Dutch Patent Office
 
For more information about the Zarafa Summercamp and photos visit: http://www.zarafa.com/summercamp2010/photos.